Savannah Guthrie is sharing a heartbreaking message on Easter Sunday (April 5).
The 54-year-old Today anchor appeared in a video for Good Shepherd New York’s digital Easter gathering amid her mother Nancy Guthrie‘s disappearance.
During the speech, she admitted that she is having a hard time handling her “season of trial,” and reflected on her religious beliefs.
“Good morning everybody. Happy Easter. And Easter is happy. It is flowers and pastels and baby bunnies. It is sunshine and joy and hope. It is rebirth and second chances and new life and fresh starts,” she began.
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“It is the most important day of the year for all of us who believe. Even more than Christ’s birth, more than his death, his resurrection, his second birth into a permanent life. That is what is most crucial to us. His revival and resurrection mean the same for us. We celebrate today the promise of a new life that never ends in death. But standing here today, I have to tell you, there are moments in which that promise seems irretrievably far away. When life itself seems far harder than death,” she confessed.
“These moments of deep disappointment with God, the feeling of utter abandonment. For most of us, there will come a time in our life when these feelings hold sway. In our tradition, we are taught to take comfort in the fact that our friend Jesus in his short life experienced every single emotion that we humans can feel. That his taking on the form of humanity made him not a distant observer to our pain, but a hands-on experiencer of it.”
“Recently though, in my own season of trial, I have wondered. I have questioned whether Jesus really ever experienced this particular wound that I feel, this grievous and uniquely cruel injury of not knowing, of uncertainty and confusion and answers withheld. In those darkest moments, I have thought bitterly and perhaps irreverently that I have stumbled upon a feeling that Jesus did not know. After all, do not the gospel stories recount Jesus informing his disciples of his destiny, that he had been sent to die, to ultimately be raised up? They did not get it, but he did. He at least knew his fate,” Savannah said.
“And yes, it grieved him deeply to the point of shedding tears of blood in the garden of Gethsemane. But still, he knew the ending. He knew the plan. There would be suffering, but then resurrection. And so I thought he never suffered this excruciating not knowing. It is not wrong to think such thoughts, to challenge our God with questions. God does not ask us to be stoics, with standards of pain with zen-like remove or shallow slogans about the hard battles God gives to his toughest soldiers,” she said.
“Our questions to God, our wrestling with God, this is his opportunity. For through our authenticity and vulnerability comes a portal of revelation, the imparting of truth and wisdom. And so it went for me. This portal opening as I stared at yet another incongruently luminous desert sunset amidst my spirit’s utter darkness. Suddenly, I remembered the grave. I remembered three days in the grave. No one talks much about that. We focus mostly on Easter. Of course we do. We cut to the happy ending and the joy of Sunday morning.”
“And yes, we do observe the Friday before, the agony of crucifixion. We mourn by candlelight that darkest night. But after Jesus died, after he breathed his last, what did he actually know? On the cross, he cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That is the anguished cry of someone who does not know the answers. Where did his soul and his spirit go in those days in between? And what was he thinking? Did he think his time in the grave would be a day or two or a thousand years in the grave? Did his agony seem indefinite to him? That torment of uncertainty, the way indefinite pain can feel eternal. Perhaps he did know this feeling,” Savannah went on.
“After all, as humans living on this earth now, we are all suspended in that moment of uncertainty. Not three days, but thousands of years between his cross and our resurrection with him. Our faith gives us a spiritual conviction that we will be reborn, that God will redeem this pain, that every tear will be wiped away, that our Easter is coming. But we live viscerally in the meantime, the meantime of feeling unsure, lost, abandoned, disappointed, enraged, forgotten,” Savannah said.
“Our comfort is that our God has felt those feelings from a perspective of humanity. That he has compassion on us and that he promises, if not immediate answers, his sweet presence. He promises closeness to the brokenhearted. Somehow, miraculously, his loving and gentle presence makes the meantime less mean. Perhaps this is too dark a message to share on Easter morning. But I have long believed that we miss out on fully celebrating resurrection if we do not acknowledge the feelings of loss, pain, and yes, death,” she continued.
“It is the darkness that makes this morning’s light so magnificent, so blindingly beautiful. It is all the brighter because it is so desperately needed. So I close my eyes this morning and I feel the sunshine. I see a bright vision of the day when heaven and earth pass away because they are one, on earth as it is in heaven. When we celebrate today, this is what we celebrate. And I celebrate too. I still believe. And so I say with conviction, happy Easter,” she concluded. Watch above at the 48 minute mark.
Savannah Guthrie is getting ready to return to work at Today.
She has been off the air for several months following the disappearance of her mother Nancy Guthrie on February 1, but a return date has been set.
